Say you have a layer that provides a class, and INHERIT+="thatclass" in local.conf. If you add the layer to SDK_LAYERS_EXCLUDE then oe-check-sstate will infinite loop silently. Attaching a strace reveals the error message: read(4, "ERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/crasher.bbclass\nERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/crasher.bbclass\n", 52816218) = 184 read(4, "ERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/crasher.bbclass\nERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/crasher.bbclass\n", 52816034) = 184 read(4, "ERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/crasher.bbclass\nERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/crasher.bbclass\nERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/crasher.bbclass\n", 52815850) = 276 In this case crasher.bbclass is in meta-ross, which I have to blacklist because it also contains a site.conf which breaks eSDK creation (I'll also file a bug for that).
I cannot reproduce this issue here. In my case meta-selftest is referred to in my bblayers.conf, so I added an (empty) broken.bbclass to meta-selftest then added the following to my local.conf: ------ snip ------ INHERIT += "broken" SDK_LAYERS_EXCLUDE = "/home/paul/poky/poky/meta-selftest" ------ snip ------ When I ran bitbake -c populate_sdk_ext, I got this error: ------ snip ------ ERROR: core-image-minimal-1.0-r0 do_populate_sdk_ext: Failed to generate filtered task list for extensible SDK: ### Shell environment set up for builds. ### You can now run 'bitbake <target>' Common targets are: core-image-minimal core-image-sato meta-toolchain meta-ide-support You can also run generated qemu images with a command like 'runqemu qemux86' ERROR: bitbake failed: ERROR: ParseError in configuration INHERITs: Could not inherit file classes/broken.bbclass ERROR: core-image-minimal-1.0-r0 do_populate_sdk_ext: Function failed: copy_buildsystem ERROR: Logfile of failure stored in: /home/paul/poky/poky/build/tmp/work/qemux86_64-poky-linux/core-image-minimal/1.0-r0/temp/log.do_populate_sdk_ext.31808 ERROR: Task (/home/paul/poky/poky/meta/recipes-core/images/core-image-minimal.bb:do_populate_sdk_ext) failed with exit code '1' ------ snip ------ I can only assume there must be something additional at work in your setup. Any ideas?
Good news is that I can't replicate either now, so some other fix must have resolved this.